“And yuh brought her back here, eh? Now what are yuh goin’ to do?”
“Why, I thought—” began Jack.
“No, yuh didn’t think! That’s the trouble. You know —— well that a King ain’t welcome in this valley. You’ve put yourself on a level with them. The son-in-law of a shepherd! You can’t stay here. Don’t you know that for years we’ve spent money to keep the King family out of this valley? And here yuh bring one in on us.”
“All right,” Jack had replied angrily. “We’ll go back to ’em.”
“No, yuh won’t. You move your stuff over to the old Morgan place. I’ll make yuh a present of it. Mebbe yuh can live it down—I dunno; but yuh can’t stay here on the Arrow.”
Jack thought all this over as he leaned on the corral fence. They had lived there less than a year. People avoided them. Molly had no women friends. To them she was the sheep woman, although they were forced to admit that she did not contaminate the air. Jack took her to dances and tried to make her one of the crowd, but without success.
And the men were not friendly to Jack. He had been one of them; one of a crowd of wild-riding, rollicking cowboys, who drank, played poker and danced with reckless abandon. In fact, Jack had been a sort of ring-leader of the gang.
He missed all this more than any one knew. But most of all he missed the home life of the Arrow ranch.
His sister and her husband, Bill Brownlee, lived at the Arrow. Brownlee hated the sheep even worse, if such a thing were possible, than did Marsh Hartwell. There were three cowboys employed:
Three gunmen, as Molly had called them.